Rinaldo Took Advantage of Protective Transfer to Escape

Prison officials tried to protect John G. Rinaldo--a notorious white-collar criminal from Southern California--and he made them pay for it.

Rinaldo, 53, is on the lam after escaping last month from a minimum-security federal prison in northern Oregon where he had been transferred because correction officials at Lompoc believed that his life might have been in danger.

The transfer occurred in mid-March after a Times article disclosed that Rinaldo, convicted of bank fraud and money laundering, had been a jailhouse witness for the prosecution last year in a Mafia-related, double-murder trial in Indiana.

“While we have to protect society from inmates, we also have to protect inmates from other inmates,” said Dennis Grossini, prison spokesman at Lompoc.

Once a multimillionaire real estate investor based in Newport Beach, Rinaldo turned to a life of crime in the early 1980s and gradually acquired a reputation as a silver-tongued and imaginative con artist. He has twice been convicted of white-collar crimes.

But because he had no history of violence and was serving a jail term of fewer than five years, correction officials said Rinaldo was transferred from Lompoc to an honor farm in Sheridan--in effect a prison without walls.

Wearing civilian clothes, Rinaldo fled May 14 in a stolen prison truck that was later found behind a day care center near Portland. Authorities said the blue prison emblem on the side of the white truck had been covered with paper.

Rinaldo had been about halfway through a 46-month sentence. “This is really dumb,” said Paula Mabrey, an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles who prosecuted Rinaldo. “He didn’t have that much longer to go” in jail.

Now, she said, he faces another five years in prison when caught.